from Ben Pope of the Chicago Sun-Times,

Hockey is a sport of extreme fluidity, of constant movement by a dozen players making in-the-moment decisions that interact -dynamically with each other.

Baseball is a sport of chronological, singular events, hundreds of which combine to complete a game.

The latter is enormously more quantifiable, and the Cubs, for instance, have mastered the systems that most accurately quantify it and use that information for a supposed competitive advantage. But so has nearly every other MLB team, diminishing the advantage.

That’s not the case in the NHL, where some analytics have taken root over the past decade but not nearly to the same degree they have in baseball. That’s a product of the sport’s complexity, not an indictment on the smart minds behind hockey’s analytics movement.

The Blackhawks, who hadn’t exactly been leading the analytics movement, now are attempting to race well ahead of the curve and adopt a more MLB-like -approach.

That’s why they hired Kyle Davidson, who built the Hawks’ new in-house analytics department last summer, as their general manager. Then Davidson took things a step further, hiring longtime Cubs executive Jeff Greenberg as his associate general manager.

continued